- Privacy. Stoke is a paid subscription. I’m not selling your data. Caveat: if you connect an agent over MCP, what that agent does with your data is up to you. I can't control that.

- Data. The core product is the projection, and it’s only as good as the data underneath it. Plaid data is imperfect, so there’s always some cleanup to do. ChatGPT and Muse may do a decent job of recategorizing transactions and even remembering those fixes for future ones, but I think direct access to those controls (categories, rules, overrides) is a better experience than asking a chatbot.

- Portability. Everything you’ve modeled lives in Stoke, not in one AI assistant's memory. You can freely switch from ChatGPT to Claude or anything else without losing anything.

- Not mutually exclusive. All the questions you would ask your LLM about your finances, you can still do via the Stoke MCP, so I see it as the best of both worlds.

I've been through many finance tracking apps, starting with Personal Capital, then Monarch, and most recently Copilot. None of them have worked perfectly for my needs.

All of these apps tend to model “cash flow” as the net sum of your transactions during a month, yet while credit card charges are reported immediately, they are typically deducted from checking (cash) accounts the following month when the bill is due. As a result, I've always had to maintain a separate spreadsheet to track my actual cash flow.

These apps also have a huge focus on managing budgets, which has never been for me. My spending is rarely consistent month-to-month, so every month I'm comparing my fully justified spending against my budget, and tweaking my budget until I “pass”.

So I built yet another finance tracking app. It has the usual components - accounts, transactions, categories - but the core is a cash flow projection engine, and everything else is built around it.

Budgets are gone. Instead, each income/spending category is projected forward from your historical activity, but not as a flat monthly number. They land in whatever account you historically use (e.g. checking account for paychecks/rent/bills, credit/debit cards for daily spending). Credit card payments are modeled automatically based on your projected credit card balance. You can set up your own recurring transfers between accounts as well, to model savings, for example.

The end result is that the app can forecast how your cash moves, and you can see in advance when any account might run low. If all of your accounts look good for the next 12 months, maybe you don't have a budgeting problem.

What’s made the biggest difference for me has been the MCP integration, which I have connected to Claude (but can be connected to any AI agent of your choice). I have asked it to import historical transactions by uploading PDF account statements, categorize/tag all transactions that took place while I was on vacation, and plan transfers across my accounts to cover expected payments.

I hope some people that share my frustrations will find this app useful.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50122776

Points: 33

# Comments: 20